Diana and The Queen: Her Majesty was the Princess"s greatest supporter, sending her to a psychiatrist and hosting a family therapy session

The truth about Diana and The Queen: How monarch was Princess's greatest supporter… until THAT Martin Bashir documentary

With her child-like enthusiasm and ready smile, Prince Charles’s new girlfriend was just the type of house-guest to appeal to the Queen. The year was 1980.

And there was no doubt that Lady Diana Spencer had just passed the Balmoral test with flying colours.

‘We got hot, we got tired, she fell into a bog,’ remembered Prince Charles’s friend Patty Palmer-Tomkinson, ‘She got covered in mud, laughed her head off, got puce in the face. She was a sort of wonderful English schoolgirl who was game for anything.’

Welcome to the family: The Queen tried to help Diana into her role as a Royal. Her eldest son seemed finally to have picked himself a winner. And who could blame her for thinking so

The whole family liked the 19-year-old Diana. Edward and Andrew competed with their elder brother to sit beside her at evening picnics, and Prince Philip clearly appreciated her good looks.

To his mother’s evident relief, her eldest son seemed finally to have picked himself a winner. And who could blame her for thinking so

What’s largely been forgotten in the dramatic arc of Diana’s short life is that the Queen was one of her most caring supporters.

For the past year, Charles had been spending more and more time with Camilla, the wife of Guards officer Andrew Parker Bowles, and the affair had even reached the ears of the Queen.

‘Ma’am,’ a senior courtier had informed her, ‘the Prince of Wales is having an affair with the wife of a brother officer, and the regiment don’t like it.’

In April 1980, Charles had taken Camilla with him to Zimbabwe, where he was due to represent his mother at the country’s independence ceremony.

Ostensibly, Camilla was flying over to see her husband.

But at a formal dinner in Harare, the couple flirted ostentatiously and Charles fumbled below the table with his mistress while her husband stoically looked the other way. The incident was so flagrant that reports of it reached the Queen.

‘There are times,’ said a courtier, ‘when the Queen and Prince Philip are just plain baffled by this eldest son they have produced.’

Little wonder, then, that Charles’s parents were so relieved to welcome Diana to the fold. It helped, too, that she’d known the Royal Family since childhood, when her father Earl Spencer rented a ten-bedroom farmhouse on the Sandringham estate.

'The Queen's thought in those days,' said a friend, 'was that Diana was a “new girl” who was finding it very difficult to get used to things'

Ever vigilant, the Queen was determined to protect her potential daughter-in-law from the almost immediate and overwhelming Press interest.

‘She looked out at Diana coping all on her own and she really felt for her,’ said one of the Queen’s friends.

That November, while Diana was visiting Sandringham, hordes of reporters and photographers surrounded the house.

Characteristically, the Queen said nothing to Charles directly, but she did speak to Philip, who wrote their eldest son a carefully considered letter.

Media pressure was creating an intolerable situation, said Philip, which meant that Charles must come to a rapid decision. Either he must offer Diana his hand, or he must break off the relationship to avoid compromising her reputation.

‘Read it!’ Charles would furiously exclaim to friends in later years, whipping the letter out of his breast pocket.

‘It was his attempt to say that he was forced into the marriage,’ recalled one who saw the note.

However, another who read it confided: ‘It was actually very constructive and trying to be helpful. It certainly did not read as an ultimatum.’

On the wedding day itself, in July 1981, Her Majesty was as giddy as everyone else with the high emotion of the day. That evening, she watched the wedding all over again on large screen televisions set up in Claridge’s.

Dry martini in hand, she studied her own image intently, pointing delightedly whenever the cameras caught one of her famous glum faces. It was noted how she beamed with pleasure whenever images of her new daughter-in-law appeared.

She did not leave till 1.30 in the morning, hitching up her skirt and performing a little jig as she said her goodbyes.

‘I’d love to stay and dance all night,’ she said.

Diana had known the Royal Family since childhood, when her father Earl Spencer rented a ten-bedroom farmhouse on the Sandringham estate

Three weeks later, she welcomed Charles and Diana back from their ocean-going honeymoon with similar gusto.

As they approached Balmoral in an old pony trap, the Queen ran alongside, hopping and skipping to keep up, while her husband pedalled on an ancient bicycle before shooting off ahead to greet them at the door.

But it was soon apparent that something was amiss. At midday, the Queen would appear in the hall in her headscarf to take the women guests to lunch with the men on the grouse moors. It went without saying that no one should be a minute late.

‘So there we’d all be waiting in the hall,’ recalled a guest, ‘making polite conversation — and no Diana.

So after a time, the Queen would send off a footman, and he’d come back looking embarrassed. “Sorry, Ma’am, the Princess of Wales will not be joining the party for lunch.” ’

The Queen would go very silent. Friends saw the danger signs: the pursed lips, the extra quick blink of the eyes. In the monarch’s view, staying in your room at lunchtime was something you did only if you were ill — or rather odd.

Still, one had to make allowances.

‘The Queen’s thought in those days,’ said a friend, ‘was that Diana was a “new girl” who was finding it very difficult to get used to things.’

It was rather more complicated than that, for in the year since she made her first successful appearance at Balmoral, Diana had made the astonishing discovery that her husband’s deepest emotions were committed to another woman.

‘Whatever happens, I will always love you,’ she’d overheard him saying to Camilla on the phone, while taking a bath.

Both this and her discovery that his mistress had given him new cufflinks featuring their entwined initials provoked a series of terrible rows.

'She's not like the rest of us,' explained the Queen of Diana. 'She's very young'

That autumn in Scotland, Diana would be smiling one moment then breaking helplessly into tears the next, and her new mother-in-law tried hard to help her.

Pondering on what had happened to the jolly girl who’d been ‘game for anything’ one year earlier, Elizabeth referred the problem to experts.

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Diana had made the astonishing discovery that her husband's deepest emotions were committed to another woman

She’d taken Diana’s side from the earliest days, and particularly in the division of roles after the separation, when she’d resisted Charles’s efforts to cut down his wife’s access to royal perks such as the Queen’s Flight and the royal train. But now Diana had strayed into dangerous constitutional territory.

She’d not only questioned Charles’s fitness to be king, but also mounted a kind of challenge to the Queen herself by saying: ‘I’d like to be a queen of people’s hearts.’

The Queen of the United Kingdom acted at last. The previous December had seen the second anniversary of the couple’s legal separation, the point at which British law permitted a simple no-fault divorce by mutual consent.

On December 20, 1995, a uniformed courier from Windsor Castle delivered a personal letter from the Queen to her daughter-in-law.

‘Dearest Diana,’ it began, according to Paul Burrell, Diana’s butler and ‘rock’ in her days of separation, to whom she showed the letter.

The Queen explained that she had been discussing the ‘sad and complicated situation’ with the Archbishop of Canterbury and the Prime Minister, who were both in agreement, and she was now expressing her own personal wish that Charles and Diana should formally and finally divorce ‘in the best interests of the country’.

She ended the note with an affectionate scribble, ‘Love from Mama’, but her message brooked no argument.

The dream marriage formally came to an end the following August. Charles, Diana and the monarchy could all now make a fresh start.

But just one year and three days later, the British ambassador in Paris rang Balmoral around 1am, rousing the duty private secretary, Robert Janvrin, from his sleep. The embassy was receiving police reports, he said, of a serious car crash that involved the Princess of Wales.

The news of Diana’s death came through from Paris just before 4am, and the Queen’s first reaction was to think of her grandsons.

‘We must get the radios out of their rooms,’ she said to Charles.

Mother and son discussed whether to wake William and Harry — their grandmother felt strongly that they should have a decent night’s rest before they had to face what would be the most difficult day of their lives.

‘Looking after the boys’ became her top priority in the difficult days that lay ahead.

‘We must get them out and away from the television,’ she said as she clicked across the mournful images of the dead princess being played non-stop on every television channel.

‘Let’s get them both up in the hills.’

She assigned Peter Phillips, Princess Anne’s bluff, rugby-playing son, the task of taking William and Harry out on the moors on stalking and fishing expeditions, with lots of mucking around on the brothers’ noisy scrambler motorbikes.

At 15, William seemed to take it bravely, on the outside at least. Not quite 13, Harry had been more obviously upset.

‘Was everyone quite sure that Mummy was dead’ he was heard to enquire.

Could it just be checked to make sure there had not been some mistake

Over 23 million British viewers watched the princess nervously but deftly answer the questions of Martin Bashir on Panorama 'There were three of us in this marriage,' was her edgy skewering of the Camilla situation

The Queen had no doubt that the calming and secluded Highlands were the best place in the world to help the boys with the therapy that always lifted her in times of trouble — lots of fresh air and exercise. But down in London there was mutiny in the air.

‘Where is the Queen when the country needs her’ demanded an open letter on the front page of The Sun.

Compounding the Queen’s absence was the lack of any flag flying at half-mast above Buckingham Palace as a sign of royal mourning.

Tradition was one of the keystones of the royal mystery. If Prince Charles had died in a car crash the previous Sunday, the Queen would not now be flying the Union Jack at half mast over Buckingham Palace. She had not done it for her beloved father. She would not expect it for herself or for her mother.

So why should tradition be overturned for a young woman who, just like her Uncle David, Edward VIII, in the abdication crisis, had put her own wayward concerns before those of the family

Her Private Secretary Sir Robert Fellowes tried making the argument, but got the answer he expected. Both the Queen and her husband had a deep mistrust of making concessions to the popular concerns of the moment, particularly when voiced by the tabloid media.

Unhappiness over the flag was something that the sacred and enduring monarchy should rise above in a world of trendy gestures. The flagpole must stay bare.

‘There were times in that week,’ said a No 10 insider, ‘when you could not believe what was coming down the line from Balmoral. You wondered if they were living in the same century.’